Deal Registration: Is a Win-Win Enough

The point of the post was that deal registration is a great opportunity for emerging vendors to take advantage of a multi-vendor network to make it easier for partners to do business.

I argued that multi-vendor deal registration provides significant benefits both for Partners and for Vendors that would improve partner satisfaction and loyalty as well as partner recruitment:

For Partners

Visibility: Every deal registration with participating vendors is tracked centrally providing easy access to all qualifying registration activity, including vendor disposition, turnaround time, close ratio, etc. Reporting is provided at the individual, team and location/territory level to ensure everyone has line of sight to all his or her activity by vendor.

Operational alignment: Deal registrations are managed based on the reseller’s preference – either directly by the individual partner sales rep or SE or on their behalf by an authorized admin so the information flow is consistent and uniform.

Simplicity: Single, easy to use workflow that captures all the customer data once and all the vendor required data for each participating vendor in a multi-vendor solution

For Vendors

Ease of Doing Business: Registrations are managed based on the reseller’s preference – enterred centrally or directly by the individual partner sales rep or SE.

Persistent Insight: Persistent registration of every opportunity is an effective way to maximize your visibility to partner pipeline activity and minimize the potential for channel conflict.

Recruitment Impact: By using an existing process already in use by many reseller organizations this reduces the partner’s cost of onboarding a new vendor.

The benefits above are clear but the history of deal registration is one of sub-optimized utilization of vendor systems burdened with lots of complexities. So, perhaps fixing the systems issues is but the first step.

Perhaps it’s time to look at applying game mechanics to help partners operationalize registration more consistently throughout their firms. Inserting a bit of fun and a measure of immediate gratification might go a long way toward engaging partner team members to register their opportunities earlier in the process to the benefit of all.